NSA head General Keith Alexander believes the NSA's data-slurping programs should "be something we put forward as an example to the rest of the world," due to the oversight afforded by the courts, Congress, and the administration.
The spy chief made his remarks at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, …

Re: Huh?

The only thing democratically elected representatives care about these days is the size of your donations, or how many kiddies will be affected if they don't change the law to protect them and therefore generate positive press. I think the era of caring about the electorate is over, if it ever existed.

Re: Huh?

300 phone numbers, 53 "terror-related activities" .... one statistic leads to the other, they are not the same nor do they state they are..... state intelligent things are you may get more respect, idk.

time for some serious declassifying, Keith.....

You've lost control of the narrative, Keith. Time to come clean on all your programs that potentially target Americans so that we can make intelligent decisions on what should be kept, what should be tossed and what oversight and protections should be going forward.

Re: time for some serious declassifying, Keith.....

Forget Americans. Time to come clean on NSA activities that target citizens and legal residents of the USA's so-called "allies." A Canadian or Australian should no more be subject to warrantless (or rubber-stamped) scrutiny than an American.

Re: time for some serious declassifying, Keith.....

Unfortunately, people living outside the U.S. or it's territories have no legal standing under the U.S. Constitution. As long as we don't terror bomb London or Melbourne or start shooting Canuck kids taunting our soldiers, you won't get any help from U.S. law. If you read that XKeyscore PowerPoint preso on the Guardian, you will see that basically you can enter some multisyllabic justification for why you want to surveil someone outside the U.S.--and then it's off to the races.

Wish I had better news for you, but I am sure that the rest of the 5 Eyes plus our other allies treat U.S. residents the same way.

Still, if we can put a crimp in the NSA, the other countries may think twice before going full Orwell.

Less than 300?

Re: Less than 300?

Robocalls?

If the NSA can track all of our phone calls? Lets turn them lose on those annoying robocalls that wake me up at Oh God in the morning to try and sell me Satan's latest "As See on TV!!" special.

In the US, the FCC claims it does not have the technology/brains to be able to track those unwanted callers. However the NSA claims to have stopped (the number changes!?) many terrorist attacks just by using metadata. If this is so perhaps we could turn the surveillance over to the FCC?

Re: Robocalls?

Secret police could be either the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, DEA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tabacco and Firearms, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Treasury agents, depending on what they want to nail you with when they cart you away.

Yeah, right

Such warm and honest words. I love the fact that the folks working with the data they slurp off 7 billion people are not just some knuckle-draggin' bozos but actually qualified personel. I feel much better already.

Re: The cheek!

Re: The cheek!

See, you've screwed up on two points here.

First, the Congressional committees aren't secret, they just can't tell us (or somewhere in the high 90th percentile of the rest of Congress) what they hear about the goings-on at the NSA/CIA/DIA/DNI, etc. At least not without getting arrested for leaking classified info. So basically they can offer oversight, but if they want to warn the public they have to drop cryptic hints about how the public might want to consider that someone might be monitoring their communications, as Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden has been doing the last couple years.

Second, bad idea to suggest that you will commit seppuku. Tomorrow, if they find you in a pool of your own blood, the CIA/DIA/MI5 can come forward and say "Hey, it wasn't us! The guy said he was suicidal only a few hours before!"

Remember, you're not paranoid, you're just uninformed about what is really happening!!

You may not like people reading your email, but unless you encrypt it, you are sharing your thoughts with every admin of every router or email transport agent that handles it on the way to its recipient - and possibly the NSA, if you say anything interesting to them. You might as well put it on a postcard.

Here's a clue

Other countries do exactly the same monitoring as the U.S. It's a necessity to maintain world peace and reduce terrorism and crime. Just because the assembled masses are clueless doesn't mean there is anything wrong with this surveillance.

Re: Here's a clue

Ohh GTFO of here!

Other countries that are trying to do the same but failing due to lack of tech or money include North Korea, Cuba, China, to some degree UK and its on the wish list of politicians in Australia. So the company the US keeps are about the same places that have not signed the delarations of human rights - ohhh wait the US have not signed that one either...

"Example to the rest of the world" - Read this General Alexander!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm

"Journalist Duncan Campbell has spent much of his life investigating Echelon. In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract. There's no safeguards, no remedies, " he said, "There's nowhere you can go to say that they've been snooping on your international communications. Its a totally lawless world."

Spying Nation - All it takes is for a person with access to abuse the system

Even if oversight worked and lets take the great job banking and data protection regulators do, there is always room for 'interpretation of the rules'. Sprinkle in a few rogue operators to the system, and this guy's assurances aren't worth a ****! This is from yesterday, its about old school spying, but its relevant to Prism because there will always be those that abuse power....

I took classes/exams similar to what he's talking about - they're crap

While I didn't have anything like the clearance Snowden would have had, I did hold a Secret level clearance. After they cleared me, but before I could actually access the data covered by that clearance, I had to "take classes and exams" like he said. Basically you view Powerpoint type presentations that tell you the rules for accessing data, what you can do with it, etc. and then are given multiple choice questions at the end. One could probably get 50% just applying common sense to the exam questions, the rest is just memorization of the right answer to questions that look like they might have multiple valid answers, plus getting down the terminology they use.

I'd say it compares almost exactly with taking the written portion of a US driver's license test, if they used different terms for things like traffic signal, stop sign, etc. The classes/exams I was required to take would guarantee people followed the rules almost exactly as well as passing the written portion of a driver's license exam guarantees you'll follow the rules of the road. Thus, in both cases, effective policing is necessary - and Snowden's claim was that this was not done very well (or) at all. If you think people around you drive poorly now, imagine how they'd drive if they told you the roads were heavily policed but everyone knew there were no cops at all on the road.

When I had my clearance I assumed they were actually monitoring things quite closely, not that I was ever exposed to anything most would consider to be worthy of clearance. My understanding is that that at the "Secret" level they don't protect individually sensitive stuff so much as things that could be sensitive when taken in aggregate or when viewed through a specific lens. Thus, a database showing toilet paper deliveries to military bases around the world might be tagged 'Secret', or possibly even 'Top Secret', because if you became aware of a large increase in the amount being shipped to the base in Riyadh, you might infer some sort of major military offensive in the Middle East was coming.